In April 2025, the University of Denver bet its basketball future on a Division II winner. Tim Bergstraser arrived from Minnesota State Moorhead, where he'd gone 75-22 with three NCAA Division II tournament trips and a Sweet Sixteen, bringing his staff — associate head coach and offensive coordinator Spenser Bland, assistant Kyle Heikkinen — and a handful of his MSUM players with him. It was a full-culture transplant, the kind of hire that either transforms a program or flames out spectacularly. One year in, the early returns say transform.
The 2025-26 Pioneers went 15-17 overall and 8-8 in the Summit League, tying for fourth — the program's best league finish in eight seasons. They won five of their final seven games, authored the first three-game Summit League road winning streak in program history, and swept their final league trip through North Dakota, the first away sweep of North Dakota and North Dakota State the program has ever managed. For a team picked to be an afterthought, Denver spent February playing like a contender.
The nonconference slate told you everything about Bergstraser's ambition: the 32nd-toughest in the country. Denver went 7-8 against it, with road wins at Montana State, Colorado State and Northern Colorado — three teams that went a combined 34-7 at home against everyone else — and finished 2-0 against in-state competition, the only unbeaten team in Colorado against Colorado schools. This is a program that doesn't duck anyone, and in year one it started beating people it had no business beating.
The engine of it all was Carson Johnson, the MSUM transfer who became the 2025-26 Summit League Player of the Year — Denver's first conference player of the year since 2005. Under Bland's direction as offensive coordinator, the Pioneers produced one of the great offensive seasons in school history: 2,650 points (second-most ever), 927 field goals (third), 283 three-pointers (second), 513 free throws, and a school-record 77.3 percent from the stripe. Twice they hung 98 points on Division I opponents — against Oral Roberts and at North Dakota — both among the top-five scoring outputs of Denver's modern D-I era. When the Pioneers got rolling, nobody in the Summit wanted to see them.
Denver's history makes this moment matter. The program dates to 1904, joined the Summit League in 2013 after wandering through the WAC and Sun Belt, and carries one glaring, motivating fact: the Pioneers have never made the NCAA Division I tournament. Not once. Every season in Denver is, in some sense, a chase for the program's first-ever bid — the white whale that would validate a century of basketball at a hockey school.
They play in Hamilton Gymnasium, the intimate bandbox inside the Ritchie Center that seats just over a thousand and puts fans right on top of the floor. It's crimson and gold, it's loud for its size, and it's the kind of home floor where a hot shooting team can make life miserable for visitors. The Bergstraser era has already made it a tougher out; the next step is making it a fortress.
The 2026-27 season is about the leap from plucky to dangerous. Year two of a system is when the concepts become instinct, when the recruiting starts to match the scheme, and when a program that finished fourth starts thinking about March in Sioux Falls — the Summit League tournament, the only path to that elusive first NCAA bid. The league won't sit still: South Dakota State has a new coach in Bryan Petersen after Eric Henderson left for Drake, Kansas City handed its program to Mark Turgeon, and North Dakota State and Omaha remain the standard. But Denver just proved it can win on the road in this league, and that's the currency that matters.
What makes the Pioneers genuinely fun is the underdog math: a mile-high program with Division II soul, playing money games against the sport's giants and winning its share, led by a coach who has won everywhere he's been and a system that just produced the league's best player. The first NCAA tournament bid in program history is still out there, unclaimed, waiting for the right March. After 2025-26, Denver looks closer to it than it has in a decade. The Pioneers are coming — and the Summit League has been put on notice.
The road ahead is the fun part. Year two of the Bergstraser era brings continuity — the system is installed, the staff knows the league, and the players know what's expected — and in college basketball, continuity is the closest thing to a cheat code. The Summit League tournament in Sioux Falls remains the only door to the program's first NCAA bid, and Denver just spent a season proving it can win the road games that tournament runs are built on. The white whale is still out there. But for the first time in a long time, the Pioneers look like a program with a harpoon.